SELECTIONS FROMJohnson Family CHINA BLOG

We started BLOGGING when we went to China, so we could have a history of our important events. This blog contains those stories, many of which are stories of faith and economic survival, and of making many friends who helped us along the way!

Some things in China are very different from my experience in the United States of America. Like carelessness over financial things and passwords is not as severely punished in the USA. You can forget things, lose things, and get solutions fairly quickly. There are multiple options for getting things "fixed" and people you can "escalate" things to in order to get a solution.

But when I first arrived in China, I had trouble even cashing American Express Travelers Cheques at the most major bank here in ChongQing, a city of 32,000,000 people. They looked at me like I had some strange strange request and I even had a Chinese person from my office helping me to translate everything. We traveled to three banks who all said no they could not cash these checks so I could get some Chinese money (RMB) exchanged, and we finally ended up at a large bank that would do it, the bank the other banks referred us to. The problem was there were lines to wait for, it was approaching 5:00 pm, and when I got to a window at 4:00 pm, they took so long at the teller window to examine each check individually, while the clock was ticking, and over an hour had passed.

I had signed all of these checks in front of them (you can only sign them once), and then when they were done counting/examining each check, taking no less than 20 or 30 seconds for EACH check to look at the front and back, carefully, they wrote down the tally and finally went to go get the money. This was all done behind the glass where I could just watch what they were doing… problem was now... a manager came and told them that it was too late to get any money.

Never mind that they had kept me there for over an hour carefully pouring over each check and closely examining it, One by one, and then when they were finally satisfied that these were not forgeries (because apparently they had never seen this before), then they moved to the next task which was to actually get me the money… Never mind that I was already IN the bank, already at the window, and we were just finishing a transaction. Never mind all that and that they took 10 more minutes arguing about it, the answer was: "come back tomorrow" and I did my best to control my anxiety over what was happening. Even the Chinese translator knew that this was not copacetic. Here I was being handed back checks that were already signed, and yet the rule is that you must sign these in the presence of the teller. Well, what if that same teller was not there the next day? (she wasn't either, and so yes I was worried about all these unknowns: would they honor these checks??).

​So I made them write a note stating what had happened, seal all of the signed checks in an envelope, stamp the envelope with their seal, and then I took the envelope. I made sure my translator told them to do all that. I wanted to make sure that my ONLY access to some real money before my payday which was a month away, was possible. Who would have known these things were possible??​​Things like forgetting a pin number on a bankcard. A week after this experience, that's exactly what I did. Oops! What do you do? Well, in America, It's simple. You just go into your bank, show your ID, and get things fixed pretty much immediately. Here I have to go home and find my passport, come back with a Chinese person who has time to help you, fill out forms in Chinese that I have no idea what it says, nor what the tellers are telling me or asking me, so it is imperative that I bring a Chinese friend who can do this for me, interpret, and then in the end you don't get helped right away by the bank, no simple walk to the ATM machine to enter a new PIN code, no, you have to wait a week or two before things are straightened out by an internal review committee, and come back much later, a week later. So if you make a little mistake like forget your pin number (or worse! lose your card), you are out of luck as far as getting your money is concerned. You can't even share a bank account with your wife here. They don't do that. Bank accounts are for individuals. So my wife could not get access to this money either. And she had no money in her account.

My company had to loan me some money in the meantime by paying me back in RMB cash for my expenditures on moving expenses, and I couldn't put it in a bank, so I had to hide it at home in a big cash pile in a suitcase in a closet. That way I could get things, like a phone, buy groceries, pay bills, etc. etc. all in cash. And it was very awkward to get all of this fixed. There are no shortcuts and there is no other way. There is no convenient method that I could find or any Chinese person could offer me. That's because there was no convenient solution, for anyone no matter who you are.

There are no credit cards I could go get. I've got ONE card and if I lose it or if it gets stolen I am in trouble for a while. I got cut off from my cash this way in my first month being here because I did make that mistake, until the company paid me my reimbursement cash "early." ​

I could not use my ID a week later at the bank when they told me to return with ID, because my passport ID was tied up at the ChongQing Police Department getting reviewed with all of the rest of the family's passports in order to get our residence permit, and they needed it for a whole week, and so I had NO ID and no way to fix this. I had to wait, a long time (3 weeks total wait). Because I forgot my pin number and used the wrong pin number five times trying to make a withdrawal, my bank ATM locked me out of my money. It now considered it a stolen card. I would have thought that I could've just talked to a teller and fixed it right that very minute. But no, I had to wait weeks, and I needed a passport, something that the ChongQing Police were hanging on to. It was horrible. Just one of those little (yet BIG) unexpected things that I could never have predicted nor known how careful I needed to be with a pin number. Just the first of many such experiences where it is nearly impossible for a foreigner to figure it out.

Hi I'm Grant Johnson and I was an engineer in China from 2013-2015. 你好！我叫 Grant Johnson。 初年我是工程师在中国的 2013-2015。

I lived with my family there (wife and 5 of our 12 children) in a small city of only 2 million 我 跟我的家人一起住过了在中国（我的太太和五个孩子）里面的小城市200万 (and growing rapidly 成长速度非常快). Half of them went to the local LiaoGongDA university and learning Chinese 三个人上辽工大学了汉语. ​

A bullet train is coming to town高铁要来阜新. I was helping on that process 我的工作就是在这个过程中帮助. Check me out on Linkedin.com where I have a profile with links to a variety of work I have done.